I want to join the Fediverse. I don’t have a computer or anything to make something like a Lemmy instance, and I found that NodeBB will easily allow you to make a forum quickly, but I have to pay to do so. Should I just pay when I can or is there a free way to make a federated instance on a software?
There are free tiers for some cloud providers, like Oracle (though personally I recommend against using anything Oracle ever).
I use Oracle fo No Lastname Needed, and it works well (although I have out grown the free tier), but I would NOT recommend them for a newbie to hosting as it’s a very complex eco-system compared to just a cheap VPS